Nashville native Fred Buc was bitten by the radio bug while in his teens, and never got over it as he went on to program his college station at Vanderbilt University, later launching his professional on-air and programming career in his home town. After serving in a variety of positions at stations in both Charlotte, NC and Kansas City, Buc returned to Music City in 1992 as Production Director at Tuned In Broadcasting’s Triple A WRLT (Lightning 100). He was later asked to take the OM position for the local company, which at the time had five signals in the market, leading to Buc being named GM for the group in 1998. In this eQB interview, Buc talks about being a programming guy running the business, how the task of serving a local market has changed in his tenure there, PPM’s arrival in Nashville and his view on the future of the radio industry.
By Jack Barton
Fred Buc
Nashville native Fred Buc was bitten by the radio bug while in his teens and never got over it as he went on to program his college station at Vanderbilt University, later launching his professional on-air and programming career in his home town. After serving in a variety of positions at stations in Nashville, Buc moved on to Charlotte, NC and Kansas City, returning to Music City in 1992 as Production Director at Tuned In Broadcasting’s Triple A WRLT (Lightning 100). He was later asked to take the OM position for the local company, which at the time had five signals in the market, leading to Buc being named GM for the group in 1998. As the industry started to shift in the first decade of the millennium, Tuned In decided to focus on its strongest property, Lightning 100, and shed the other four signals in order to better serve the Lightning audience, and that is where Buc remains GM today, dealing with the new set of challenges that the ever-changing media landscape presents on a daily basis. In this eQB, Buc talks about being a programming guy running the business, how the task of serving a local market has changed in his tenure there, PPM’s arrival in Nashville, and his view on the future of the radio industry.
You came into radio on the creative and programming side, yet decided to switch to the business side over a decade ago before that career arc became fashionable. Talk about making that shift.
I had always wanted to be on the management side. I knew radio was going to be my career, but I didn’t necessarily want it to be as a PD because those guys moved around a lot from market to market and that just wasn’t me. I had thought about station ownership as a younger guy, and I definitely thought about station management. The fact that I was OM before I became GM meant I had already been exposed to just about every side of the radio station, so it wasn’t that big of a transition. Plus in a former lifetime, I had an ad agency and had to handle the business side with that where you have to know about HR, payroll and accounting systems, so again, it wasn’t that big of a transition.
How did you have to shift your perspective and change your priorities?
Well your priorities definitely are changed, as it is much more asset and bottom-line focused than just coming into work each day and making sure the format clocks are running like they’re supposed to. It puts you more out in front of the entire operation and less behind the scenes.
Having done almost every job on the creative side, how does that impact the way you lead your staff, setting priorities and goals and motivating them to be creative while meeting the business goals?
Different departments have different kinds of goals, but all are financially based goals. Even if they’re in a creative position, I always want every department to be thinking about what gives us the best return on our investment. Is this a win/win for both us and the other party/parties we’re partnering with and is it a good use of our time? Is there potential for future revenue or more revenue? So regardless of whether they’re in a creative role or in a business role, I always want them to be thinking about those scenarios.
How have the answers to all of those questions you mentioned changed in the twelve years you’ve been the GM?
It’s probably more fine-tuned today than twelve years ago. At that point it wasn’t that important for the programming department to think about those things. You just wanted to play the best music to hopefully get you the best numbers, and then everything else would fall into place. Financial priorities certainly weren’t top of mind for me when I was PD, or even OM, but I’m asking our staff to think more about those today.
How do you focus them so that they don’t lose their creative vision, but understand the bigger picture a little bit differently?
I’ve always let people be creative. We have a small staff, so I can’t micromanage. People are more productive when they’re not mandated or given strict rules to live by. It’s a lot easier to pull somebody back than it is to push them, so I let them create. We all know the mission of the company and I trust that their actions are going to reflect that.
Other than the financial goals, what is the mission of the company?
Our motto has always been, “It’s about the music.” Everything we do we try to focus around music. Our ultimate goal is to be the destination for anybody who wants to know anything about music happening in Nashville. Whether it is by radio, interactively, listening to our stream or a podcast from one of our features, we want them to think of Lightning as the best resource.
With the arrival of PPM in Nashville, how has that affected the station’s programming, as well as how you work with clients?
It’s still too early to tell. We’ve just had the second month released and we haven’t seen much change at all. The good news is PPM is showing everyone’s cume much higher, including ours; much higher than was previously reported under the diary method. But the fact that everybody’s TSL is down is affecting the agencies a little bit, but it’s still too early to tell. Things haven’t leveled off yet.
Back in the day all the competition you had to worry about was the other stations in the market. Now you also have Pandora, blogs and whatever’s going to pop up tomorrow. How do you deal with that?
Hide our head in the sand (laughter)! I’ve come to the realization that there are only so many hours in a week, and what has changed over the years is there are too many different things vying for someone’s ear and eye time. And there will continue to be more.
We’ve always had to play the niche game. We’ve always had to cater to a niche because we didn’t have a blow torch 100,000 watt station here. So we have always had to practice serving a small, loyal piece of the pie. We’ve essentially gotten a 15-year head start on what some of the bigger companies are dealing with today. That makes us a little more knowledgeable at how to market ourselves and not be so struck by this rapid change in multi-platforms. It’s an exciting opportunity because now radio gets to be in the picture and in an arena where we always had to fight against print and television, all companies are now multi-media companies and that’s exciting. It levels the playing field a little bit more and allows us to play in some sandboxes that we weren’t invited to play in before. So we try to stay true to our mission, which is offering products and services to people who are musically intelligent and are serious about different genres of music.
How do you compete with those other platforms?
I don’t want to say that we turn a blind eye to the Pandoras of the world, but quite honestly I’m more concerned about how we’redoing and not so much worried about what they’re doing. We certainly want to be able to offer some things that some of these other competitive services may not be able to offer, so we’ve been focusing more on local music and exposing people to that through different things. We try to feature local artists several times a day on the Local Lightning Spotlight. We put on a local concert series downtown this year, Live on the Green, which was our second year of doing that. We produce that event ourselves and it attracted over 30,000 people in a six-week concert series downtown in front of the courthouse. There are people who are hungry to be exposed to local music here and I think we can do that much better than a lot of these other competitive platforms. We may not be as technically savvy as they are at this point, but we’re way ahead of the curve on niche marketing.
You mentioned that Lightning has always used a “niche” strategy in the market. Talk about selling a niche product in the age when advertisers are looking for critical mass.
We’ve always had a history of making things happen; we’re “the little engine that could.” We’ve made the most out of our size and we’ve always been able to give the impression that we’re bigger than we actually are, and that comes from doing much more than going over and beyond. We’re very event driven on the business side, because we can fill seats for people beyond the regular concert buy for the core artists we play. We can sell the arts, the museums and the symphony, and anything event oriented. If we feel it’s a good match for us, we can make it happen for them.
On the flip side, the retail mom-and-pop advertising has been challenging through this period, but we have some loyal clients who have been with us, but that’s because they serve a niche as well. You don’t hear McDonald’s spots screaming over our airwaves. It’s usually an eclectic dining experience somewhere that matches up quite well with our audience. Both (owner) Lester Turner and I are native Nashvillians. He knows a lot of people in town, I know a lot of people in town, and they both know where we work and we understand each other. We really try to pick and choose our partners, and we always strive for a win/win.
Talk about the future of the medium.
The FCC has given us this license to serve our community. Radio continues and will be expected to serve the public not only in emergency situations, but also to address the ongoing issues within the community. It needs to be a mouthpiece regarding the good and the bad: the economy and jobs issues, government issues and things the community needs to know. To be able to do that, stations have to be unique and they need to produce unique, compelling content, and get people to turn on the radio station. You have to offer something that’s not available anywhere else and combine that content with what’s going on in your community. Radio’s going to have to focus more on their own community and less on that voice-tracking seed from a jock 2,000 miles away.
What are the priorities and challenges in maintaining a local focus?
We can’t stop developing talent. That’s one of the big problems the industry is facing. We have to reach out and get the younger generation excited about working in radio. It may not be through just music alone, because they have their own ways of listening to music, and most likely it’s not coming from the FM radio on their desks. So we have to get younger people interested in this business maybe through reporting, maybe through something else that excites them, I don’t know. But something they want to be on the air to talk to people about.
We also have to find the best, most economical way to package our material. We produce several of our own Specialty programs in-house using our own people to mix up the programming a bit. I do my Retro-Lightning show on Saturday morning which is a flashback show. We have an Indie Underground Hour, where we play local bands on Saturday night. I mentioned the Local Lightning features, and the Music City Roots program. Somebody had mentioned to me a few days ago that it might look like radio is returning back to the days of block radio program, rather than hearing Journey every three hours on the radio. I’m not advocating that all stations go block programming 24/7 but we need to use appointment listening to give the audience reasons to come hear our unique, compelling content. That’s what’s going to keep the medium going.
[eQB Content by Jack Barton]
